Somatic Psychotherapy, Trauma treatment EMDR, Berkeley/Oakland

Welcome to my practice!

I hope you find what you need here to support you. I work closely with a number of highly skilled, insightful, and profoundly caring practitioners to offer what we aim to be some of the best integrative wellness and health care available in the Bay Area. And know too that we are always happy to refer out if there is a better fit for you elsewhere.

I have been a somatic therapist and professional counselor providing individual, couples, family, and group therapy since 1991. I was introduced to BREEMA in 1996 as the result of a profound injury/accident, and began studying in 1997. Now almost 30 years later, this wholistic, inclusive, common sense principled practice and philosophy, has become the foundation of my psychotherapeutic work. BREEMA is simple, basic, rudimentary human, and offers us nothing less than transformation.

As a clinician, I practice integrative, somatic, holistic, trauma therapy, tailored to meet the needs of each client and context. I am adept with a number of theoretical orientations and modalities, and work comprehensively with a myriad of issues- emotional, psychological, relational, and situational. BREEMA is always the foundation of my work.

What I'm understanding from my many years as a clinician, seeing thousands of people in therapy, as well as from my teaching and supervising countless clinicians in training, and of course my own experience being human, is that we are fundamentally whole in nature. Yet, over the course of our history, we have incurred some basic misunderstandings and deep distortions regarding who and what we we are, how we work, how life works, our purpose and meaning for being here, and how to participate most fullfillingly in life. This often goes back generations. Over time, we become increasingly uncomfortable with ourselves because we are disconnected from the truth of ourselves. We try to fill our emptiness with things that don't nurture our being and ultimately we despair. What a good reason to seek therapy. Each individual, couple or family will have their own path and process for finding the answers they need. Most are pretty simple, yet not often easy. But this is where therapy can help.

In my experience, for a therapeutic process is to be truly 'healing,' or transformational, it has to include that wholeness the we originate from. We have to find a tangible connection to that wholeness. This discovery begins with the body. And to truly include the body one must begin by finding a non judgmental relationship with the body. This is a cornerstone of BREEMA.

BREEMA educates us via the instinctive wisdom of the body, bypassing the associative and fragmented conditioning of the mind, to unify ourselves in an experience of increasing cohesiveness that begins with connection between body and mind. This profoundly revolutionary approach to healing puts us in the hands of the Universal Principles governing life, the body, and the interrelated interconnected unity of life, where we can discover by experience, our own intimate relationship with Existence and truly participate in the best of being human, experiencing our true nature. Once we have this experience, much of our confusion in life falls away because we now have an inner compass, a connection to a real center of gravity that we can rely on.

" Don't fight sickness, nurture vitality,

then let vitality take care of the sickness."

from Breema: Essence of Harmonious Life, by Jon Schreiber

This basic tenant of Breema expresses an underlying understanding that every aspect of life is inherently connected to a bigger picture~ every cell connected to and included in a larger body, and that all imbalance and disharmony can be addressed by understanding what is vital and supporting that. This is where we will begin in our work together.

I trained in Breema at the Breema Center in Oakland; Gestalt, Body-Centered, and Somatic Therapy at Esalen Institute; EMDR with Philip Mansfield at JFK University; Psychodynamic and Counseling Psychology at Berkeley’s Wright Institute, and group therapy at both Esalen Institute and at the New Bridge Foundation. I've trained and worked for many years in both inpatient and outpatient behavioral health institutions, and several private practice and community health settings.

Formerly a program director at the New Bridge Foundation’s residential behavioral health treatment program in Berkeley, CA, and a primary therapist at Bayside Marin’s behavioral health outpatient treatment program in San Rafael, CA, I incorporated BREEMA, somatic therapy and body centered meditation into the group therapy treatment curriculum with great success; working primarily with active duty veterans, young adults and their families, couples, recovering professionals, first responders, formerly incarcerated men and women reclaiming their lives, and clients with co-occurring mental health and substance abuse issues. I also incorporated these principles into my training and supervision with my staff team at New Bridge. It was here that I discovered the body is as indispensable to the therapeutic process as it is in navigating daily life.

Currently I am a clinical partner at Greeting Health, an integrative wellness practice at the Breema Clinic in Oakland;

adjunct faculty at National University, Berkeley Psychotherapy Institute, and CIIS graduate psychology program, teaching courses in clinical supervision, group therapy, and somatic approaches for treating trauma. Along with several colleagues, I have recently launched Blackbird Institute in Oakland CA, where we work training and offering clinical supervision to psychotherapy interns and associates interested in treating trauma through a developmental, somatic, evolutionary and transpersonal lens.

Team